Anuman ang sabihin ng mga kontra-aktibista, wala nang ibang magpapatunay sa kawastuhan ng linya at pamamaraaan na tinahak ng mga estudyanteng nag-protesta laban sa tuition hike kung hindi ang mismong pag-atras at pagsuko ng CHED (Commission on Higher Education) at ng PUP (Polytechnic University of the Philippines) administration sa kanilang maitim na balak, at ang hindi pagkakatuloy sa paga-apruba ng mga bagong bayarin sa UP (University of the Philippines) nang dahil sa kolektibong pagkilos ng mga kabataan. The campaigns wouldn’t have been successful any other way.

To be clear, Kabataan Partylist, together with its founding organizations like the National Union of Students of the Philippines and its student leaders, have long pursued lobbying for greater state subsidy for education and holding dialogues against any attempt to hike tuition and other fees. We have always been ever mindful and aware, however, that it is militant and collective action that is decisive in winning our democratic fights. The government never granted us our rights on a silver platter, after all, especially when it is equally determined to pursue its selfish agenda, without any genuine intention to listen to the demands of its constituents. True enough, students had to barricade Quezon Hall, bring down the gates of CHED’s main office and throw paint bombs at its glass doors for these offices to bow down to the democratic interests of the people they were supposed to serve.

Nais kong ibalik ang tanong sa mga kontra-aktibista. Ano ba ang sinasabi ninyong mas mapayapa at mas epektibong paraan na hindi namin ginawa? Ginawa niyo ba ito?

Napakabilis ng pagkondena ng mga kontra-aktibista sa “marahas” na paraan na ginawa ng mga estudyante. Nasaan ang inyong pagkondena sa tuition increase na kung tutuusin ay mas marahas dahil sa pagkakait nito ng magandang kinabukasan sa libo-libong kabataan? Ni hindi ko narinig ni nakita miski sa isang Facebook status message ang pagtutol ninyo dito.

Is it that easy to forget, that throughout history, the freedom of nations, the rights of the people were never won with mere diplomacy. All of them were fought for by the people through street protests and bloody revolutions.

Today, five student leaders of PUP remain detained under the custody of the police for charges of of “robbery” filed against them by the shamed PUP administration. These students were among the hundreds who tried to bring to the gates of CHED their dilapidated desks as a sign of protest against the state’s abandonment of education. Samantala, patuloy pa rin ang sistematikong pagnanakaw sa kaban ng bayan, ang pagakakait sa mamamayan ng karapatan sa serbisyong panlipunan, at ang pinakamadugas na magnanakaw ay nasa Malacanang.

(Students will still gather and hold a protest action on March 29, 2010 at the Board of Regents meeting of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines at a posh bayside hotel in Manila, to ensure that CHED and the PUP administration hold true to their word that they will not increase tuition in the nation’s largest state university.)

Below is a commentary written by a colleague, Frank Lloyd Tiongson, a former writer for the Philippine Collegian and currently a law student and an instructor at UP Diliman.

NOT YOUR NORMAL EVERYDAY VIOLENCE

Those squeamish, middle class, “educated” liberals? Yeah, they’ll be the first to pull the trigger when someone hands them a gun.

Because in the middle class imagination, there is only one kind of violence: the pitchfork-wielding-mob type, the rampaging-soccer-fanatic type, the genocide-instigating-tyrant type. And when their own naïveté slaps them in the face, when they have been pushed into a corner, they will only know how to wield the same kind of violence ““ the mindless, destructive kind.

It is no wonder that various forums are flooded with the self-righteous condemnation of the “violent” mass demonstrations in UP and PUP. Throwing school desks from balconies, forcefully barricading the administration building, and lobbing paint at a school administrator, they say, were too much. Those militant activists, a lot of them would say, were uneducated, incompetent fools who let emotions get the better of them. I also saw at least three people quote science fiction writer Isaac Asimov: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Well and good. But doesn’t it mean that the Philippine revolution and other uprisings around the world geared to overthrow colonialism were fueled by incompetence? Everything has been reduced to a question of competence, educational background, and etiquette. Perhaps next time those activists can bring a copy of their curriculum vitae before setting fire to a pile of chairs.

What their “education” apparently failed to impart to them is the ability to make distinctions. Constant exposure to ideological state apparatuses can, indeed, do that to a person. Violence, my dear lads, enables you to drink your morning coffee in peace and allow you to step out of the house without expecting anyone to hit you with a bat. It has only been ingeniously masked with the terms “security,” “punishment,” “law,” and “order.”

Hence, once the semantic muck has been cleared, one can always see state-instigated violence ““ what Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation calls “Gewaltmonopol des Staates” or the monopoly on violence. What makes us stop when the traffic light turns red is not etiquette. It is the knowledge of the violence that the state can inflict on us. After all, it has the whole armed forces, the police, and hired mercenaries, not to mention the horrors of Philippine jail management, at its employ. Law-abiding citizens are necessarily masochists, under constant exposure to different forms of legitimized violence.

Consequently, what results is a misrecognition and misunderstanding of violence. We never consider the state and its apparatuses such as the Board of Regents as perpetrators of violence. They are always the sources of order. While those lofty-minded liberals are quick to denounce violence, they fail to account that violence is very much present even in the minutiae of daily life, even in their haughty declaration that those “violent” hooligans who spray-painted Quezon Hall were uneducated and incompetent activists (which is actually a very poor example of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu meant by symbolic violence since it can only be inflicted by those who possess symbolic capital).

Hence, everything else that do not fall within the ambit of such legitimized violence is plain and simple violence, such as the radical mass demonstrations in UP and PUP. It is, indeed, a matter of determining which is more violent: a graffiti on the wall, chairs thrown from balconies, or a student unable to enroll because of excessive fees, or a single teacher tasked to check 200 papers for the same measly salary because some person “soberly” decided that it is practical to increase class sizes.

Again, this misrecognition is simply a case of their inability to make distinctions. A closer inspection of the BOR protest would portend that the seemingly “violent” acts were actually carefully calculated. If those “scoundrels” wanted to do violence upon UPLB Chancellor Velasco (and I mean real violence) they would have thrown rocks, plants, and even the entire Oblation statue at him. When Malacañang-appointee Regent Abraham Sarmiento was blocked from entering Quezon Hall to attend the meeting, what prevented the students to hurt him and allow him to go away unharmed? Remember that Sarmiento was the Malacañang-appointee who was behind the whole PGH directorship fiasco and the whole issue on the eligibility of Student Regent Charisse Bañez.

The paintball hurling and the barricading were precise and surgical deployments of violence, enough only to bruise egos. They were symbolic acts intended to remind their targets of the students’ and faculty’s fury. They served to tell them, in the corporeal sense, that the students can touch them, that our discontent is thick enough to be cut by a knife, that there is no such thing as impunity and avoiding accountability. These are far from the mindless, destructive violence pervading the minds of haughty “educated” liberals.

Ironically, it is the same class of people who would recommend filing charges against the demonstrators. They are the same people who would seek harsh sanctions and penalties against those incompetent hooligans for “abusing their freedom of expression.”

Those squeamish, middle class, “educated” liberals? See, they are the first to call for blood.